CLEANING. CLEANING, CLEANING, CLEANING, CLEANING… Some other persons, Aurovilians or not, may have problems so obvious I notice them and get some idea of what they may have to make progress on. But that always sends me back to myself, and to what I myself have to make progress on as well… and that’s plenty of things!!! The two main problems I had to deal with before (over years and years of patient uprooting of the wrong reactions in me to certain circumstances, or whenever possible, of slow transformation of those wrong reactions into the spiritually correct ones, so much more pleasant to experience…) are by now nearly over; but there is a third one, which “circumstances” have of course caused to invade my life more and more in the last few years: the problem of keeping things clean all around my house. Two aggravating factors have to be mentioned here: !/ My house is so near the sea (even in normal conditions) that the salty damp air flows all the time into everywhere, leaving a sticky film on everything, that soon will attract and keep dust on it, making everything dirty much faster than it would be in a house elsewhere…. 2/ The things in my house are so many in each category (books and files, clothes, hats, sunglasses, sun tan creams, swimsuits, shopping bags, DVDs, skin care products, empty small bottles, empty big bottles, etc, etc) that although within each room each thing is strictly and carefully kept in the place where it belongs, still each category overflows and gets dusty, simply because there are just too many things there…!

So during the last two weeks, especially as the internet connection was most often not there, I have been cleaning a lot, if not always with a result visible to others. But I have to keep the right balance, for it is impossible for me to spend my days being only the home-keeper: although I like very much cleaning things, there are other activities I like to do too and am good at too and am supposed to do too, particularly this blog as my beloved ‘Laboratory of Evolution’ outer work for Auroville, for which I am getting a monthly “maintenance” amount from Auroville, covering the regular basic expenses I have for my daily life here.

So as you can see my life too, like my house, is too full. There are too many activities I find myself having to take up here, because each activity is truly needed for Repos to keep existing, but there is no one else at the moment to take up those various necessary activities. And yet I also must keep some time for washing myself, for resting during the day, and for getting proper sleep at night (and that means, for dreaming too…!). Having that many things to do is pretty much like trying to juggle with more balls than you can realistically handle: you keep losing them and seeing them fall and you keep getting them back going, but then another one starts falling, etc, etc. The one activity that nearly always gets relegated to the end of the priority list is the cleaning. Result: my poor house is more and more invaded with piles of stuff waiting to be sorted out and cleaned, for the time being tucked away as invisibly as possible in every still empty available corner. It’s not all my stuff, mind you: you wouldn’t imagine how many friendly guests, intending to come again soon, leave under my care ‘just that small parcel’, ‘just that little bag’, ‘just that small size metal box’… and then for some reason never come back. For quite a long while you still expect them to indeed come back, so you faithfully keep as promised the ‘small’ whatever you accepted to keep for them. It all accumulates nicely over the years. Until one day you look at your house, at your guest-room in it, and even also at the big store-room outside, and you realize it’s all full of stuff abandoned there by all those good-intentioned people. Add to all that a lively lady cat, very nice and all, but loving irresistibly like all cats to go after any edible living thing that disappears under any pile of any stuff anywhere, and you are in for catastrophic landslides at anytime, the cat-attacked pile exposing then suddenly for all to see its variegated contents until then neatly contained at least. Well, the good thing about this kind of cat-caused landslide is that it at once transforms the sorting out and clean up of the concerned pile from low priority to absolute top priority, so in a way it is beneficial. I have at times highly suspected the Divine Wisdom as well as Playfulness of the One Being inside Whom all this is happening, to have secretly guided the creature chased by my cat, to disappear right under the pile that really needed urgent attention from my part. I have to admit this trick works, and I do take immediate care all right of the cat-ruined pile, but still I find it a totally unfair, if clever, strategy for the One to do that to me when I am already overworked with so many other urgent things to do!… The December cyclone of course has been another totally unfair catastrophe that made things only much worse than before: speak of cleanliness anywhere after rain, wind and fragments of keet (dry coconut palms made into highly biodegradable roof material), plus some sea-water and sand on the floor, including under every piece of furniture, have soaked everything up for three days and nights before some rays of sun started at last to reappear… After that horrendous cyclone (and I know it could have been still much more horrendous…), the only way I found to cope with the immensity of the cleaning work to be done, both outside in the whole of Repos, and inside my own house, was to pretend there would be all the time in the world to deal little by little with all that mess. The problem was, the very sight of all that mess was making me sick inside: it was such a sad and ugly sight, my eyes didn’t know any more where to look for some tiny bit of beauty left. It hurt so much I was screaming inside, but it was no use screaming aloud, or letting my sobs come out. The only way to keep the inner strength and courage and endurance that would be necessary for how many months to come, was to keep the pain well locked up inside of me for as long as it would be impossible yet to let it out. Last Friday, I was able at last to address the mess that my desk had become since those days and nights end of December. Only the later, upper layers had a semblance of order and cleanliness to them; under were still the deeper, more ancient layers of papers and bills and Guest-registration forms blocks and everything else, all caked and glued together by the water and dirt that had managed to filter through the closed windows, onto everything I had been unconscious enough to leave in their usual place, outside on my desk, instead of better protected inside the metal almirah next to the desk. I never expected that cyclone to hit us so hard in Auroville. It could have been much harder still, but even that much has been for me too much, and I have yet to recover from the deep trauma of it all. While sorting out finally the mess still underlying everything on that desk, some tears did come out, briefly. I was half-living again those horrible moments at night when nothing seemed to be able to stop this elemental violence from happening and from ruining so much of the work we had done here for forty years. Auroville as a whole has recovered, I believe. But here, after we had recovered a bit too, there was a tsunami alert a few weeks later, which luckily was a false alert, but still was scary enough for one more of us to decide to go live elsewhere in Auroville; as for the month of June, as you know, with the massive erosion it did to our beach and to the very land of Repos itself, it has been a hard blow again. It is not easy for me to understand why that too was necessary. The fact is that only on the night of July 5th, when the situation had suddenly become really bad for the biggest house, and quite alarming for my one (the waves were so strong, Aurovilian and local friends, and even unknown passers-by were already advising me to leave), only then did I call for collective help from you all. It would seem I needed that extreme degree of urgency in the situation, for finally calling for help in the inner action immediately needed. And, lo and behold, the situation immediately (from the next morning on) started to change for the better, a better that since then has unexpectedly stabilized and has given the few of us who still live here an almost entire month of July, free of any erosion or even threat of it by the ocean.

Is it in order that we learn to truly trust and fully use this inner means of self-protection for ourselves and for Auroville, that this threatening situation has been allowed to take its toll until we did the right thing? Was that all part of our inner training?… It would seem to be the case. That’s the only thing that makes some sense, I would say.

And what about today, and what happened just now?! This afternoon I intended very much to go to a second meeting of our re-activated ‘Beach Group”, in order particularly to follow-up on certain very urgent financial matters concerning Repos; but I got so engrossed in the writing, in this new post for my blog, of all those events and emotions and questions, the meeting at 3 pm got totally forgotten and it is only now, at 4.30 pm, that I suddenly remembered it, with the jolt you can imagine. I was of course totally expected to go there, everyone must have wondered why I wasn’t showing up; nobody phoned me to find out, though; that would certainly have stopped me from writing and sent me like a rocket to the forgotten but so important meeting, but it so happened that no one phoned me to check why I wasn’t coming, so I just kept writing, completely oblivious of anything else. No guest came to disturb me either, as is usually the case all the time for one reason or the other. I have been allowed to remain in this complete deep concentration and absorbing expression of my feelings and my thoughts over the past seven months. Amazing. This is the much anticipated year 2012. Quite intense indeed. But we are learning and growing, yes we are… At the moment, as far as I am concerned, very much by way of CLEANING, which was indeed much needed!… I guess this post is part of the inner cleansing as well – and that, too, was much needed.

What a fantastic energy and will-power you have! I am amazed every time.
I do hope for you, though, that the clutter in your case is considerably less of an Herculean task than in my case!!! 😀
Cheers,
Bhaga

that they do not fill the needs unmet by emotions, that there are some gaps that only people or relationships with living beings, such as my dogs and cat, can really fill and satisfy

while the new roommates provide some incentive for the declutter, given the expansion of my household from just me to a total of 4 now finding a harmonic balance …. well I find that I long to simply and streamline my possessions to what i really need for an enjoyable existence

CONSCIOUS EVOLUTION

Conscious Evolution is for you and me. It is for the whole planet. It is the Next Step which is simply the logical, to be expected continuation of all that Evolution has already made happen upon this little Earth over the eons past.
The difference is that now the human species is there, and we human beings can consciously participate in our own gradual transformation into a more evolved species.
Any progress in that direction, by any of us, will help accelerate the overall progress for the whole Earth and all its inhabitants.
It is happening. Will you help?

‘In Matter shall be lit the spirit’s glow…’

'In Matter shall be lit the spirit's glow,
In body and body kindled the sacred birth;
Night shall awake to the anthem of the stars,
The days become a happy pilgrim march,
Our will a force of the Eternal's power,
And thought the rays of a spiritual sun.
A few shall see what none yet understands;
God shall grow up while the wise men talk and sleep;
For man shall not know the coming till its hour
And belief shall be not till the work is done.'